Mark Perry started a magazine on a children's typewriter. "I had a children's typewriter plus a felt-tip pen," he said later, as uDiscover Music reports, "so that's why the first issue is how it is." That was Sniffin' Glue, the British punk fanzine that hit the street in July 1976 and burned out a year and 12 issues later. Cheap, fast, and ugly on purpose.Fifty years on, somebody's selling a zinc-alloy music player with a scroll wheel and real buttons. The Surfans F20 plays the files you…

Selfie a day for a year, day 44: Oct 7, 2026 edition. Just waiting for the kids.

This week I completed the update to Zig 0.17 and released Kiesel 0.4.0! It contains 64 commits across 2.5 months, see the changelog for the full list of user-facing changes.Kiesel.args / Kiesel.envI mostly build rather than use this project, and it shows — beyond the core language implementation only a few APIs needed for real-world programs are available. We did have file I/O for a while, and with the addition of arguments and environment reading a simple cat(1) clone becomes…

I've been a fan and follower of Weird Web October ever since it started a couple of years go (and obviously I'm a fan of keeping the Internet fun and weird). But this is the first year in which I've actively participated in it. This, my first contribution to Weird Web October 2026, targets day/prompt 8: skeuomorphism. I found myself thinking about all of the examples of skeuomorphism in our computer user interface metaphors: radio buttons, toggle switches, drawers, tabs, etc. Then I realised…

I have posted a preprint of my new paper “Adam Smith and the ‘Absurd Prescriptions’ of Doctors” to SSRN! Starting next week, I will begin blogging about another aspect of Smith’s stance towards doctors and medical schools more generally: his lengthy 1774 letter to Dr. William Cullen.

The first recording today starts with trails for M.I. High and Richard Hammond’s Blast Lab. Then it’s Deadly 60 – India. Steve encounters a King Cobra. A less venomous Rat Snake. A Vine Snake. A very deadly Saw Scaled Viper. Some Sloth Bears, rescued from being dancing bears. Slightly smaller but still deadly, is the Preying Mantis. Media Centre Description: Naturalist Steve Backshall’s quest to meet 60 of the deadliest animals on the planet takes him to India. He is on the trail of the…

So, I started over. I re-mathed, re-figured, went for a different type of increase, took careful notes, tracked what I was doing round by round, and stopped to try on a lot. I added a pair of decreases down the back that makes the whole thing much more fitted: And instead of doubling the increases in the raglan line for the front piece, I continued to increase on the front after splitting off stitches for the sleeves. My full bust measurement falls below that line, so why increase too much…

[This is a guest post by the Association for Human Mathematics, reposted from their statements page. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] Yesterday, on October 6th, 2026, OpenAI — which is currently defending lawsuits against accusations of illegal plagiarism, copyright infringement, and trademark dilution — released a repository of manuscripts purporting to contain solutions to a number of high-profile problems in mathematics.…

Having relocated with her family to a small coastal community south of Melbourne, IKSRE is about to release a new sound bath. Titled, “In All Her Forms”, and a follow up to 2022’s “Awake Within The Dream”, taking inspiration from her new surroundings, the hour-long set uses water’s shifting physical states as a metaphor for transformation. The essential element making its presence felt throughout. “Lake Shore” is a shimmer of synergising drones and angelic harmonies that ripples, rapidly before…

Artfully created with tender care and expertly performed with empathetic insight, world premiere opera The Spare Room is an engrossing and affecting work. Perennial champions of new work, Victorian Opera has shown extraordinary dedication to the commissioning of new works across their 21 years. There is the sense of a special magic around The Spare Room, being a contemporary work that is definitively set in Melbourne. “Come on Melbourne it’s supposed to be Spring” is a line that could readily…

This past Thursday, the girls and I went to our local Walgreens and got some of our shots taken care of; I did a double-dose of flu and COVID. This will hopefully protect me from at least 13% of the winter’s oncoming contagions. I was a little foggy on Friday but was able to work through it, and apart from a morning headache it had no other impact. I felt so good, in fact, that I went to help Bennett put the rear axle in his Hudson on Saturday. I pulled the Scout out of the garage and drove it…

I can’t help it, sometimes I have long-winded thoughts about the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise and need to post them somewhere. On some occasions, that’s been here this blog. I created a new tumblr account a while ago, Green Hill Lab, specifically to section away my Sonicposting so that it doesn’t take up room elsewhere. If you’re into Sonic and use Tumblr, go give it a follow! Otherwise, I’ve assembled a few of my Sonic posts below. Enjoy. I. I miss Cream the Rabbit. She's cool. Of course, she…

As I adapt and adopt AI, I’ve come up with four rules to leverage AI while keeping my coding skills in shape. I’ve compiled them into the C.R.O.D. framework. Here it is: C) - Calculator: Use AI as a calculator: only useful if you know what you’re doing. Don’t use AI to generate code you wouldn’t be able to write yourself. Build skills first, then leverage AI. R) - Read-Only: Don’t give AI full control. You’re the surgeon and AI is your operating room staff. AI can suggest actions and hand you…

Where: Blakeburn Lagoons Park, DeBoville Slough (Port Coquitlam), Tlahutum Regional Park (Coquitlam), Burnaby Lake Regional Park (Burnaby)Weather: Sunny, 17–22°C intro text Blakeburn Lagoons Park The view from the “main” viewing platform. I suggested Blakeburn Lagoons to see if we could spot the Green Heron again. We did not see any the Green Heron. Or any herons that were green. Some patience at what I think of as the main viewing platform paid off, as a Pied-billed Grebe eventually emerged.…

The social media discourse is ablaze with people porting apps from slower dynamic languages to faster statically compiled languages. And we've seen both Shopify and Coinbase start switching away from React Native back to native mobile apps. What's changed, and what's next for programming ecosystems? I think the answer is less about performance than it first looks. Why did people use cross platform frameworks? When modern smartphones first came out, there was an explosion in native app…

I haven’t read noir before, but if The Intrigue is typical of its genre, I’m not much of a fan. I love stories that show people’s humanity and goodness despite their flaws. In this book, by contrast, the main characters just get crueler and more brazen over time. The writing was pretty good, and I enjoyed the setting in rural Mexico. Just not my style, I guess.

Even here at Pordenone, not every film you watch can be a masterpiece. So rest assured that tonight’s gala screening of A Page of Madness (Teinosuke Kinugasa, 1926), with live benshi narration from Kataoka Ichirō, more than fulfilled the festival’s chef d’oeuvre quotient for the day. It screened in the evening, with more shorts, all … Continue reading Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2026: Pordenone Post No 5 →

This blogpost is adapted from a transcript of my talk given at Breakwater Festival in Gdańsk. You can find the slides here. I am an Internet plumber. I’ve been an Internet plumber in many organizations, including journalistic ones. I’ve also done information security work for media organizations, for example in the run up to and during the Panama Papers. What I am not is a journalist. I have not studied journalism in any formal way. I’ve been writing for OKO.press and other outlets for several…

Aparna Pappu of YouTube: This builds on the incredible success we’ve seen with other Studio tools like A/B testing, where creators have run more than 40 million experiments to find the perfect titles and thumbnails for their videos since the feature officially launched in 2024. Coming soon, you’ll also be able to test up to three video cuts to see which hook performs best with the new video A/B testing feature. This is a very short introduction to a potentially very transformative feature:…

Margaret Hamilton, computing pioneer who led software development for the Apollo program, dies at 90. I’ve always loved this photograph.

Judging by Aaron Sorkin's The Social Reckoning, few the world's ill can't be linked to Facebook. An overstatement on my part to be sure, but Reckoning scowls at Facebook for abetting dangerous political extremism, wrecking young lives with cyberbullying, and allowing Jan. 6 rioters to post about their assault on the Capitol. Social Reckoning isn’t entirely wrong in its assertions, but Sorkin, working from his own screenplay, has drained much of the suspense from a story built around two…

I must interrupt my regularly scheduled programming to bring you what must be the most inspired piece of art I’ve seen in a long time. Bullet Time! by Eddie Alcazar is remarkable. It is completely unhinged, unbelievably detailed, spectacularly retro, and drop-dead gorgeous. Every frame is incredible. I can’t stop looking at it. Even though nothing happens, everything is happening. I don’t know how I missed this. The style, the animation, the music (Danny Elfman!), the sound effects, the…

I'm very excited to return to Performance.Now() Conference in Amsterdam this November 19-20. I'll be giving a talk about recent work to bring HTML video lazy-loading to today's browsers, ongoing work to standardize a new HTML poster element (which will make video poster images responsive AND accessible), prior work to re-standardize and revive responsive HTML video, and perhaps more broadly a little about how I've fallen into doing this kind of work. You should go too! Get your tickets before…

In what is being called “the most important event in the history of mathematics” (by an AI), OpenAI, using an advanced model not yet available to the public, yesterday released 722 mathematics manuscripts containing 337 results it has generated on open mathematics problems. Italian Calculators (images via MoMA) “OpenAI deluged mathematicians with hundreds of new findings that span a wide swath of topics including algebra, number theory, theoretical computer science, mathematical logic and…

My old boss Alan used to append -ificate to anything he processed. Test script? No, it’s testificate. Build script? No, it’s buildificate. I have embraced this wholeheartedly in everything I do, from naming Minecraft structures, to writing scripts. Much to the chargrinification of people around me. Thanks for reading me blogificate this morning. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-10-08.

Thingy, my digital librarian, got a big improvement this week with a brand new design and moving its reasoning to the 5.5 level models (Sonnet for subscribers, Opus for supporting members). I’m very happy with how this is working now!

Prompt 9: Write a letter to yourself now, from the perspective of yourself in 10 years’ time. Hello you, You must be surprised to get this letter from future me… I’m 60 now. I know, I have definitely lived more days than I have to live. Just wanted to let you know that things turn out okay. I remember that unsettled feeling you are going through. You’ve just walked away from your job without another in sight. The job market is tight. You are sending out application after application. It’s…

Dave Winer recently wrote The web of Markdown proposing a new simpler web. I quickly realized that much of this was already present with sites like mine that serve markdown for LLMs. It was only a quick claude coding session to spin up Markdown Browser which is a web proxy that allows us to browse the Web of Markdown. I’m really happy with how quickly this came together and how many sites I was able to find in Dave’s blogroll that already support this. Still diggin!

Photographer Lucinda Douglas-Menzies has published a limited edition monograph of her portraits taken between 1978 and 2025, including some distinguished cultural luminaries alongside Spitalfields stalwarts. An accompanying exhibition opens at House of Annetta in Princelet St on Thursday 15th October and runs until Tuesday 20th October. With more than seventy of her portraits in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, we are proud to count Lucinda as a Spitalfields Life Contributing…